1) We have a "one issue per thread" policy on this forum you agreed to respect when signing up. Especially helpfull on the "feature requests" sub-board. Marking as "Invalid" therefor.
2) "On-the-fly" watermarking brings up a lot of issues and eats away huge resources, we have explained in the past why it has been turned down to include watermarking into the core.
3) Not sure what you mean with a "banner manager". However, in cpg1.4.x, there will be a custom header and footer include you could use for such a purpose, if a dynamic banner rotator script is what you're up to
4) PHP parsing has been discussed already for the template.html files in detail, I won't repeat this discussion. However, the theming has been changed very much for cpg1.4.x already, you might want to review it before suggesting any changes.
